One of the concepts we often discuss around here is “what is disease?” As we’ve seen in the discussion of Lyme disease and so-called Morgellons syndrome, this is not always an easy question to answer. Knowing what states are disease states does not always yield a black-or-white answer. The first step is usually to define what a disease is. The next problem is to decide who in fact has that disease. The first question is hard enough, especially in disease states that we don’t understand too well. The second question can be equally tricky. To explore the scientific and philosophical issues of diagnosing an illness we will use as a model diabetes mellitus (DM). This won’t be quite as boring as you think, so don’t click away yet. (Most of the information here refers more specifically to type II diabetes, but most of it is valid for type I as well.) (more…)

I was recently asked to write about vaccines and autism for Skeptic magazine. I approached the project with trepidation. So much has been written, from Paul Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets to a veritable flood of blogorrhea on the Internet. I didn’t have anything new to add, and I couldn’t hope to cover all aspects of the subject.

After some thought, I realized I could contribute something useful. I could organize the highlights into a concise and accessible story. While it awaits publication in the magazine, Michael Shermer elected to pre-publish it in the e-Skeptic newsletter. You can read it here.